For a company long known as Dallas' cutting edge of the avant-garde, Undermain Theatre's upcoming season looks positively antiquarian. That's a good thing, given the area's dearth of other options for theatrical classics.

Each of the four shows is staged by one of Dallas' leading theatrical artists. It's an impressive statement of the company's current reach.

Artistic director Katherine Owens will stage only one of the four season's shows, which is both very old and very new. Director Lisa Peterson and actor Dennis O'Hare have adapted Homer's ancient epic (as translated by poet Robert Fagles) for the stage and called it An Iliad. The two actors involved will be Bruce DuBose and Paul Semrad. It runs Sept. 29 through Oct. 27, with previews Sept. 26, 27 and 28.

Fred Curcack and Laura Jorgensen's new two-person show, Burying Our Father: A Biblical Debacle, has already premiered in California. They'll bring this riff on the Book of Genesis, in which Isaac and Ishmael meet to bury their father, Abraham, to Undermain Oct. 31 through Nov. 17.

Irish playwright Enda Walsh, who just won a Tony Award for the book of the musical Once, is SMU's current recipient of the Meadows Prize. The school's head of thater, Stan Wojewodski, will direct Walsh's Penelope for Undermain. The show will play in the soon-to-open Dallas City Performance Hall at dates in January still to be determined. This one is based on Homer's other epic, The Odyssey.

With the three new titles in the season based on material that goes back at least 3,000 years, August Strindberg's classic The Ghost Sonata, written just over 100 years ago, seems positively contemporary. This far-out, fantasmagorical text should be right up Undermain's alley. Patrick Kelly, the retired head of theater at the University of Dallas, came back to the Deep Ellum company after a long absence with this spring's lauded The Birthday Party. He'll direct The Ghost Sonata for performances April 13 through May 11, with previews April 10, 11 and 12.